CAP Leader

The first is that we crossed the half-million mark in total battles fought during a single month. Despite many other Shoddy servers coming online, Smogon University continues to grow by leaps and bounds. The amount of server traffic is mind-boggling. We have over 170,000 registered user accounts on SU. We complete roughly 12 battles every minute the server is online. Now that we easily cleared the 500,000 barrier, how much further can it go? I have no idea. But we have certainly come a long way from the roughly 170,000 battles that were hosted in the server's first month of operation. Which brings me to our second milestone this month...

This marks the 1 year anniversary of collecting stats for the Smogon server -- Happy Birthday, Stat Junkies! In July of 2008, I completed the first set of stat gathering programs and published stats here in Stark Mountain. At that time, I really didn't know what kind of impact these stats would make.

As soon as I put the Smogon University server online, I knew I wanted to collect some basic usage and lead statistics. Colin had been publishing usage stats for Official for a long time, and I knew Smogoners would expect the same from SU. But the detailed stats were just a pet-project of mine, which I decided to make public at the last minute. Prior to that, Colin had made some changes to Shoddy logging that made it possible to collect detailed information about pokemon and teams -- so I wrote some programs to take advantage of his changes. I wasn't really doing it as a "community service" -- I was personally interested in seeing the results! When I finally completed them, I said to myself, "I bet there are other people that would love this stuff too." So I included detailed stats in that first post, and they were a huge hit -- not just at Smogon, but all over the competitive pokemon landscape.

Over the past year, I have received countless messages from people in other pokemon communities that tell me they use the Smogon detail stats for reference and research. Our stats have grown in depth and complexity, and they have become part of the fabric of discussions around here. I smile every time I see someone C/P a line from the Smogon stats, when posting about competitive pokemon on the forums, the server, or IRC. The vertical-bar-delimited format of the text is unmistakable now -- and is almost universally understood without any explanation as to what it is, or where it came from. I think that's pretty cool.

A note about the usage stats this month -- I combined the usages for all the Rotom forms on the Standard ladder, and listed them as "Rotom-A" with all the other pokemon. However, I did not include Rotom-A in the actual stats or totals, and Rotom-A was not actually ranked. You will notice that Rotom-A's rank is blank. I just included the combined numbers as a convenience for people to see where the combined forms would appear in the list, if they were all counted together. All the different Rotom forms are listed separately, just like always. And I didn't do a rollup for any other multi-form pokemon, or any other ladders -- so please don't post here reminding me of the "omissions". I may not combine Rotom every month, I'm not sure. We'll see how it goes.

These stats were gathered from 524,240 individual battles that were fought during the month of July on the Smogon Shoddy Battle Server. Usage and Leads are listed in the posts directly below this one.

Garchomp, Wobbuffet and Deoxys-S are all top 12 Ubers, that is quite a far cry from what people thought before the stats were collected! Also, with Roserade and Registeel sitting at #1 and 2 in UU, I can't wait to see how that changes with Dugtrio coming down to say hi!

Groudon fell to #4, not surprisingly though with the slight burst of Rayquaza and Palkia. Salamence is falling O__O.

And Heatran the #13th lead, come on people! With Choice Specs, it ohko's Occa Metagross as well as hippowdon, jirachi and bronzong. Not to mention swampert doesn't stand a chance against hp-grass. Should be used more >_>

palkia continues to become used more, showing that he is in fact the deadliest uber (fuck kyogre)

scarf sets are one of the best revenge killers in the game, while lustrous orb sets just plow through pretty much everything on an average stall team minus a safe switch in by latias. the expert belt sub focus punch set is also deadly to stall, but still has tiny problems with latias.

Moderator

- Darkrai's out of the top 5 in leads
- Giratina-O and Lugia have the EXACT same usages. A first time that things relevant share the same usage?
- Giratina-A usage keeps on dropping
- Latios gets used more than Latias
- Lucario is still off the "OU of Ubers" list.